Category: Training and conferences

The past ten days, I have spent quite some time promoting the virtual conference Data Community Weekender Europe, or #DataWeekender on May 2 2020. I’m one of six organizers, all people from the Microsoft Data community, better known as #sqlfamily. We saw conferences get cancelled or postponed and wanted to do something for the members of the community, speakers as well as conference attendees. So we came up with the idea to organize a virtual conference – #DataWeekender.

We are not alone, EightKB is another new Microsoft Data Platform conference, in June. And GroupBy is happening as usual in May. (I have submitted sessions to both, and for GroupBy, you are very welcome to vote for my session, as their sessions are picked by the community, not the organizers).

But #DataWeekender is probably the conference with the shortest time from idea to conference day. We opened up Call for Speakers April 8 and the conference is May 2. Given that short timeframe, I’m completely blown away by the number and quality of submissions. Doing session selections has been extremely difficult. If we created a new conference, with only the speakers and sessions we unfortunately had to reject, it would still be a very respectable conference schedule.

We still have a lot of work to do the coming less than two weeks leading up to the conference. And during the actual conference, the whole organising team will be busy moderating sessions. And until then, we need to test out conference technology, distribute and get confirmation on tons of information to speakers. And last but absolutely not least, we need to continue marketing the conference to attendees.

A very important milestone in the conference planning is now done. We have a schedule! Six tracks. 42 sessions. 43 speakers. Check it out on www.dataweekender.com/schedule ! Also checkout the speaker wall below, click on speaker name to see their bio and session.

data juggler

SQL Server developer and data scientist

BI Architect

Star Wars fan extraordinaire

BI Architect

Erland Sommarskog SQL-Konsult AB

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#DataWeekender is running on a zero budget. We haven’t accepted any sponsors and we are not charging anyone to attend. Speakers get a Thank You, and bragging rights for getting selected. But nobody is paid anything. That makes marketing a little different than commercial conferences. We also do not have the Sql Saturday platform to channel information to the community. Instead, we are relying on our contacts with User Groups all over Europe and our social media channels.

Therefore, I ask from you to help promoting the conference. The schedule will be up on www.dataweekender.com late tomorrow. Whenever you see information about #DataWeekender in your social media feeds, please help us share the information. We would be very happy if you also make a post on your own about it. The speaker line-up is truly an impressive one, with MVPs, Certified Masters, Microsoft Employees and other amazing Data Platform presenters. Please help us get that known to the Data Platform community. I’m going to be more active than usual on the blog, sharing news not suited for the Twitter limited number of characters.

SQL Server User Group (SQLUG) Sweden had a meeting on October 24th. This one felt a bit special to me, as it was kind of a replay of my first time public speaking, in two ways. My first time speaking in public about SQL Server was on SQLUG Sweden, a few years ago. SQLUG Sweden arranged a Local Community Edition, with local speakers. That first time, it was me and Daniel Hutmacher (Twitter , Blog) speaking. And on October 24th, it was, again, me and Daniel Hutmacher speaking.

October 9 and October 10 2019 was GroupBy days. New this time was the two-day schedule, with five European sessions, running in European office hours, and six North American sessions, running in Pacific office hours.

I sometimes train the course “20767 – Implementing a SQL Data Warehouse”. One module in the course is about Data Quality Services. Every time I prep for the course, I run into an error message when trying to connect the Data Quality Client to (LOCAL): “A .NET Framework error occured”, followed by a stack trace.

I’m currently on a train from Gothenburg back home to Enköping. I have attended my first Sql Saturday (thank’s Mikael Wedham and crew for a great event!). I also did my first ever public SQL presentation at the event – a session about SQL Server partitioning.

On September 5th, the first ever SQL Saturday in Sweden is held, in my favourite Swedish city Gothenburg. SQL Saturday Conferences are held all over the World and this first ever Swedish SQL Saturday event is the 433rd. And yeah, the Conference is for free. A full day of free training. If you are in the neighbourhood, you do want to be there. Check out the sessions and register here.

I’m very proud to have been selected on out of 24 speakers. My session – “Eight hours of work in 20 minutes” – is a case study of how a data load has evolved, from basically SSIS-loading data into a table, through some index maintenance as part of the data load, into table partitioning. The line-up makes me somewhat nervous, but it will be great fun to make a public appearance. Old friends showing up at the event makes it even better.

This is the first post on this blog. The future posts will be mostly about T-SQL.